For
Washington, War Never Ends
The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United
States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.
DIANA JOHNSTONE
March 16, 2022
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/16/diana-johnstone-for-washington-war-never-ends/
Special to Consortium News
It goes on and on. The “war to
end war” of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And
that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good
War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?
The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off
what we already call World War III.
But this is not a new war. It is the same old war, an
extension of the one we call World War II, which was not the same war for all
those who took part.
The Russian war and the American war were very, very
different.
Russia’s World War II
For Russians, the war was an experience of massive
suffering, grief, and destruction. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was
utterly ruthless, propelled by a racist ideology of contempt for the Slavs and
hatred of “Jewish Bolsheviks.” An estimated 27 million died, about two-thirds
of them civilians. Despite overwhelming losses and suffering, the Red Army
succeeded in turning the Nazi tide of conquest that had subdued most of Europe.
This gigantic struggle to drive the German invaders
from their soil is known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War, nourishing a national
pride that helped console the people for all they had been through. But
whatever the pride in victory, the horrors of the war inspired a genuine desire
for peace.
America’s World War II
America’s World War II (like World War I) happened
somewhere else. That is a very big difference. The war enabled the United
States to emerge as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Americans
were taught never to compromise, neither to prevent war (“Munich”) nor to end
one (“unconditional surrender” was the American way). Righteous intransigence
was the fitting attitude of Good in its battle against Evil.
The war economy brought the U.S. out of the
depression. Military Keynesianism emerged as the key to prosperity. The
Military-Industrial-Complex was born. To continue providing Pentagon contracts
to every congressional constituency and guaranteed profits to Wall Street
investors, it needed a new enemy. The Communist scare – the very same scare
that had contributed to creating fascism – did the trick.
The Cold War: World War II Continued
In short, after 1945, for Russia, World War II was
over. For the United States, it was not. What we call the Cold War was its
voluntary continuation by leaders in Washington. It was perpetuated by the
theory that Russia’s defensive “Iron Curtain” constituted a military threat to
the rest of Europe.
At the end of the war, the main security concern of
Stalin was to prevent such an invasion from ever happening again. Contrary to
Western interpretations, Moscow’s ongoing control of Eastern European countries
it had occupied on its way to victory in Berlin was not inspired so much by
communist ideology as by determination to create a buffer zone as an obstacle
to repeated invasion from the West.
Stalin respected the Yalta lines between East and West
and declined to support the life and death struggle of Greek communists. Moscow
cautioned leaders of large Western European Communist Parties to eschew
revolution and play by the rules of bourgeois democracy. The Soviet occupation
could be brutal but was resolutely defensive. Soviet sponsorship of peace
movements was perfectly genuine.
The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United
States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. The lackadaisical U.S.
“de-Nazification” of its sector of occupied Germany was accompanied by an
organized brain drain of Germans who could be useful to the United States in
its rearmament and espionage (from Wernher von Braun to Reinhard Gehlen).
America’s Ideological Victory
Throughout the Cold War, the United States devoted its
science and industry to building a gigantic arsenal of deadly weapons, which
wreaked devastation without bringing U.S. victory in Korea or Vietnam. But the military defeat did not cancel America’s ideological victory.
The greatest triumph of American imperialism has been
in spreading its self-justifying images and ideology, primarily in Europe. The
dominance of the American entertainment industry has spread its particular
blend of self-indulgence and moral dualism around the world, especially among
youth. Hollywood convinced the West that World War II was won essentially by
the U.S. forces and their allies in the Normandy invasion.
America sold itself as the final force for Good as
well as the only fun place to live. Russians were drab and sinister.
In the Soviet Union itself, many people were not
immune to the attractions of American self-glorification. Some apparently even
thought that the Cold War was all a big misunderstanding and that if we are
very nice and friendly, the West will be nice and friendly too. Mikhail
Gorbachev was susceptible to this optimism.
Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock recounts
that the desire to liberate Russia from the perceived burden of the Soviet
Union was widespread within the Russian elite in the 1980s. It was the
leadership rather than the masses who accomplished the self-destruction of the
Soviet Union, leaving Russia as the successor state, with the nuclear weapons
and U.N. veto of the U.S.S.R. under the alcohol-soaked presidency of Boris
Yeltsin – and overwhelming U.S. influence during the 1990s.
The New NATO
Russia’s modernization over the past three centuries
has been marked by controversy between “Westernizers” – those who see Russia’s
progress in emulation of the more advanced West – and “Slavophiles,” who
consider that the nation’s material backwardness is compensated by some sort of
spiritual superiority, perhaps based in the simple democracy of the traditional
village.
In Russia, Marxism was a Westernizing concept. But
official Marxism did not erase admiration for the “capitalist” West and in
particular for America. Gorbachev dreamed of “our common European home” living
some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of
the West.
What happened next proved that the whole “communist
scare” justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to
perpetuate military Keynesianism and America’s special war to maintain its own
economic and ideological hegemony.
There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no
more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no
more reason to exist.
But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary
by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an
aggressive military alliance. Yugoslavia had been non-aligned, belonging
neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. It threatened no other country. Without
authorization from the Security Council or justification for self-defense, the
NATO aggression violated international law.
At the very same time, in violation of unwritten but
fervent diplomatic promises to Russian leaders, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as new members. Five years later, in 2004, NATO took in
Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltic Republics.
Meanwhile, NATO members were being dragged into war in Afghanistan, the first
and only “defense of a NATO member” – namely, the United States.
Understanding Putin – Or Not
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin
as his successor, partly no doubt because as a former KGB officer in East
Germany he had some knowledge and understanding of the West. Putin pulled
Russia out of the shambles caused by Yeltsin’s acceptance of American-designed
economic shock treatment.
Putin put a stop to the most egregious rip-offs,
incurring the wrath of dispossessed oligarchs who used their troubles with the
law to convince the West that they were victims of persecution (example: the
ridiculous Magnitsky Act).
On Feb. 11, 2007, the Russian Westernizer Putin went
to a center of Western power, the Munich Security Conference, and asked to be
understood by the West. It is easy to understand if one wants to. Putin challenged the “unipolar world” being imposed by the
United States and emphasized Russia’s desire to “interact with responsible and
independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair
and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only
for a select few but for all.”
The reaction of the leading Western partners was
indignation, rejection, and a 15-year media campaign portraying Putin as some
sort of demonic creature.
Indeed, since that speech, there have been no limits to
Western media’s insults directed at Putin and Russia. And in this scornful
treatment, we see the two versions of World War II. In 2014, world leaders
gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the
D-Day landings by U.S. and British forces.
In fact, that 1944 invasion ran into difficulties,
even though German forces were mainly concentrated on the Eastern front, where
they were losing the war to the Red Army. Moscow launched a special operation
precisely to draw German forces away from the Normandy front. Even so, Allied
progress could not beat the Red Army to Berlin.
However, thanks to Hollywood, many in the West
consider D-Day to be the decisive operation of World War II. To honor the
event, Vladimir Putin was there and so was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Then, in the following year, world leaders were
invited to a lavish victory parade held in Moscow celebrating the 70th anniversary
of the end of World War II. Leaders of the United States, Britain, and Germany
chose not to participate.
This was consistent with an endless series of Western
gestures of disdain for Russia and its decisive contribution to the defeat of
Nazi Germany (it destroyed 80
percent of the Wehrmacht.) On Sept. 19, 2019, the European Parliament adopted a
resolution on “the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe”
which jointly accused the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany of unleashing World War
II.
Vladimir Putin responded to this gratuitous affront in a long article on
“The Lessons of World War II” published in English in The National
Interest on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of
the end of the war. Putin answered with a careful analysis of the causes
of the war and its profound effect on the lives of the people trapped in the
murderous 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including his
own parents whose two-year-old son was one of the 800,000 who perished.
Clearly, Putin was deeply offended by continual
Western refusal to grasp the meaning of the war in Russia. “Desecrating and
insulting the memory is mean,” Putin wrote. “Meanness can be deliberate,
hypocritical, and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations
commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second
World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the
Soviet Union.”
And all this time, NATO continued to expand eastward,
more and more openly targeting Russia in its massive war exercises on its land
and sea borders.
The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine
The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap
ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media
recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can
be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected
president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had
agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.
Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by
extreme-right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing leadership in Kyiv largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.
By the end of the year, the government of “democratic
Ukraine” was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister
of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had
worked for the State Department before going into private business. The
minister of the economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former
basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian
minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.
Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil
Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odesa.
And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kyiv
cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the
Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime-change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely
inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were
burned alive in Odesa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in
resistance to the coup.
The U.S.-installed regime in Kyiv then launched a war
against the provinces that continued for eight-year, killing thousands of
civilians.
And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The
peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserving Russia’s main naval
base at Sebastopol from the threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of
Crimea had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita
Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without
bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of
Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.
But to the United States and most of the West, what
was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was unforgivable aggression in Crimea.
The Oval Office Back Door to NATO
Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not
encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s
“right” to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right
away. It was always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a
NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.
But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted
by the White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership
was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine
Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s
success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy” –
Washington’s current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free
World versus Communism.
It went on to spell out a permanent casus
belli against Russia:
“In the 21st century, nations cannot
be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in
Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose
their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to
work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America’s support for
Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering.”
The Statement also clearly described Kyiv’s war
against Donbas as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising
assertion: “The United States does not and will never recognize
Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” (my emphasis). This is followed by
promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of the recovery of Donbas and Crimea.
Since 2014, the United States and Britain have
surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and
militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders
this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out
military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who
tried to “understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the
simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still
don’t. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.
Ambiguous Echoes
Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in
Ukraine as necessary to stop the genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the
U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality,
the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly direr in Donbas
than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at the comparison of
Donbas with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.
But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with
the Russian invasion of Donbas: it is a cause.
Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was
no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under
U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any
country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a
violation of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any
dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe.
Libya provided a second example.
Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might
have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates
the fact that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In
Western countries, Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean
primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to
homosexuals.
But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to
Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into
Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British,
echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed-race, partly “Asiatic” due
to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white
Europeans.
Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is
to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported
Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think
if they fight on our side against the Slavs?
Conflicting War Aims
For Russian leaders, their military “operation” is
intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still
want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist
Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan
trap (giving them “their Vietnam”), this is a psychological victory in their
endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin.
Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely
want this “operation” to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The
Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and
will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation.
Today Volodymyr Zelensky implored the U.S. Congress to
give Ukraine more military aid. The aid will keep the war going. Anthony
Blinken told NPR that the United States is responding by “denying Russia the
technology it needs to modernize its country, to modernize key industries:
defense and aerospace, its high-tech sector, energy exploration.”
The American war's aim is not to spare Ukraine, but to
ruin Russia. That takes time.
The danger is that the Russians won’t be able to end
this war, and the Americans will do all they can to keep it going.
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green
Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle
in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she
recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a
peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade:
Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in
co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness:
Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be
reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
